Since education makes a person more likely to leave your region, how do you justify your investment in human capital?

Friday, December 02, 2011

Ruin Porn

Ruin porn, you know it when you see it. Using the term "Rust Belt" in the pejorative sense is ruin porn. To some extent, the idea of a Great Lakes megaregion is ruin porn. Broad brush strokes over Akron, Ohio:

Of course, the ad was not real. It was a lethal trap. At least three of the men who apparently answered it are now dead, their bodies buried in graves on the "farm" – which turned out to be land owned by a coal mine. Or hidden near the blighted city of Akron, deep in the heart of Ohio's Rust Belt – itself a grim icon of tough times and lost American glories.

Emphasis added. If I'm reaching for a grim icon of urban blight and faded glory, Akron doesn't spring to my mind. The above prose is artistic license, not journalism. It's a stock cliché, a conventional geographic stereotype. Sea serpents are swimming around in Flyover Country. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

But, seriously, you might think, who would pack up all their bags to live in an isolated trailer for a few hundred dollars a week? The answer, in the America of 2011, is depressingly simple: lots of people. Desperate people, jobless people, poor people, people with little to lose, single people, people with struggling families to support, people willing to ignore the warning signs and take a gamble.